The Commonwealth Bank's board has announced a cut in executive bonuses and directors' pay following the money laundering scandal that rocked the bank last week.

Key points:

CBA's senior executives will not be paid short-term incentives for financial year 2017

The move appears likely to cost Ian Narev roughly 20 per cent of his total remuneration

CBA's directors have also cut their fees by 20 per cent for the current financial year

Chief executive Ian Narev and his fellow senior executives will lose all of their short-term variable bonuses for the financial year just ended.

The board did not absolve itself from any responsibility for the scandal, cutting its own non-executive director fees by 20 per cent for the current financial year.

In the 2016 financial year, all of the directors who served the full year were paid above $300,000, except one who fell just short at $273,000. Then-chairman David Turner was paid $874,000.

For Mr Narev, it looks likely to be around a 20 per cent pay cut based on last year's figures — in financial year 2016, he received $2.8 million in short-term variable pay out of a total pay packet of $12.3 million, which included some long-term bonuses from earlier years that vested that year.

Mr Narev's "statutory" pay for financial year 2016 was listed at just shy of $8.8 million.

Full details of the bank's 2017 executive and director remuneration will be released in its annual report next week.

CBA releases its financial year 2017 profit report tomorrow.

Narev 'retains full confidence'

However, it appears that Mr Narev will keep his top job at the bank, with CBA chairman Catherine Livingstone saying, "Mr Narev retains the full confidence of the board."

AUSTRAC is, though, also alleging that the Commonwealth Bank took three years to identify the coding mistake

It also argues that the bank did not conduct a risk analysis into the offending "intelligent deposit machines" for years after they were introduced and failed to provide timely cooperation with AUSTRAC and the Australian Federal Police in several money laundering investigations.

Bonus cut 'nonsense', criminal action 'needs to go to the top'

The Commonwealth Bank's move to cut executive and director pay does not appear to go far enough to appease many of its critics, however.

"I don't have a violin small enough to play for Commonwealth Bank executives missing out on their bonuses when their base pay could be in the millions of dollars," he said.

"You need to have reverse onus of proof so that if bank executives are so slack in their systems, so recklessly indifferent when it comes to money laundering, then they should face jail terms."

Opposition Leader Bill Shorten said the Commonwealth Bank's inaction over money laundering added to the case for a banking royal commission.

"You had the CEO of [the] Commonwealth Bank telling Labor we should go back in the box, know our place and don't have a royal commission and, in the meantime, his own operations seem to operating in a pretty loose fashion don't they?" he said.